The Most Negative of Landslides?

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 The Most Negative of Landslides?
By Peter Augustine Lawler — October 22, 2016

Although the actual polls remain somewhat ambiguous, it now appears that Hillary Clinton is on her way to a huge victory, one that will also give her party very significant gains down ballot. Certainly the Democrats will capture the Senate and conceivably the House.

That doesn’t mean the country has embraced her as a person or her agenda. It’s actually pretty unclear what her agenda is. Sure, there’s a long laundry list of wonkish policies on her website. But she hasn’t been pushed to defend or show her real devotion to them, much less to reconcile her public agenda with that found in her secret speeches.

Our presidential elections are typically close. There’s the occasional landslide affirmation of the accomplishments of the incumbent — as in Reagan in 1984 and even in some ironic and hedged sense Clinton in 1996. There’s also the occasional negative landslide victory — LBJ in 1964 and Nixon in 1972. Those two elections were massive repudiations of the policy alternatives offered by the party out of power. It was generally conceded that Goldwater and McGovern were decent — just very misguided — men.

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http://www.nationalreview.com/node/441362/print

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There is no drive to change the House as in 2006. The Senate will fall when Trump falls as the urban centers go huge for the Democrats. .

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A sane and sorrowful analysis, summed up as follows:

We can hope that Clinton will accept that negative mandate with the appropriate modesty and let America know she knows her victory was in many ways undeserved. We can hope. More likely is another round of disastrous overreach.

We can also hope that the Republicans accept Trump’s defeat with appropriate modesty, recognizing that it was the hollowness of their conservatism that allowed their party to be taken over by a loser unfit to run a campaign, much less govern. They can forget Trump, but they can’t forget the huge protest that was the Trump vote reconstructing a conservative majority that can be the foundation of effective but limited government.

We can, finally, hope that both parties will honor the good reasons so many decent, un-deplorable Americans chose Sanders and Trump this year. Each of our parties needs a lot of fixing before deserving or gaining a real mandate for change.

The author fully realizes that, in expressing his hopes, he's not holding out much hope for them being realized.